Australia Post Annual Report 2005/06

In 2005/06, Post achieved overall volume growth of 28 million letters (0.5 per cent), marking its third successive year of growth. While growth has slowed significantly since the 1990s, this is a solid performance in an environment in which some countries have been experiencing significant declines in letter volumes since 2000. Taking into account the fact that the 2004/05 result was boosted by large volumes of mail generated for the Federal election, the underlying growth for domestic letter volumes in 2005/06 was almost 85 million letters (1.6 per cent).

Most of the growth in our letter volumes has been in the area of direct mail, where volumes were up around 6 per cent this year (compared with 5 per cent last year). At the same time, transactional mail volumes decreased in some market segments as businesses conducted more transactions electronically.

A 0.2 per cent increase in total domestic letter volumes provided revenue growth of 0.4 per cent. Unaddressed letter revenue grew by 4.8 per cent on a volume growth of 1.8 per cent. With the inclusion of associated letter products (such as eLetter Solutions), overall revenue growth for the letters business was 2.7 per cent.